Julian Assange

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• https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/jul...

Julian Paul Assange ( born 3 July 1971) is an Australian journalist, publisher, and Libertarian. He is best known as the spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website. Before working with the website, he was a computer programmer and hacker.He has lived in several countries, and has made occasional public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.

In September 2010, Assange was voted as number 23 among the "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010" by the British magazine New Statesman. In their November/December issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World".

The man behind WikiLeaks has won the most votes in this year's Time Magazine's Person of the Year poll Julian Assange but was not chosen.

Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple had separated before Assange was born.

When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company. They divorced around 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982. . . . continued

Awards

Assange was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award (New Media), awarded for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya with the investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. In accepting the award, he said: "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented. Through the tremendous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR, Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world."

Assange also won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award.

Assange was awarded the 2010 Sam Adams Award by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, expressed his "solidarity" with Assange following Assange's 2010 arrest in the United Kingdom. He further criticised the arrest of Julian Assange as "an attack on freedom of expression".

The office of Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, issued a statement calling on non-governmental organisations to consider "nominating Julian Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate."

The announcement followed commentary by Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin, who stated that Julian Assange's earlier arrest on Swedish charges demonstrated that there was "no media freedom" in the west.

In December 2010 United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Frank LaRue said Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that, "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases."

An editorial in China's Beijing Daily, a publication of the Beijing city government, suggested that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize not be given to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo but to Julian Assange.

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